The Frank Peretti Collection

by Frank E. Peretti

  I wasn’t about to let them get away with that.

  “Hi,” I said, jutting out my hand. “Praise God, I’m Travis, and this is Marian!”

  The first kid shook my hand and said hi back, looking immediately at the floor.

  “What’s your name?”

  I heard him mumble something like “Bernn.”

  I leaned closer. I knew I was invading his comfort zone, but that was the idea. “Say again?”

  He spoke up a little. “Brian.”

  We went after the Outsiders. “Hallelujah! Who are you?”

  Donny and Steve barely got their names out, but Trevor spoke right up with his. Trevor seemed to be the leader. As soon as he opened up, the other two did. I found out what grade they were in, and what some of their interests were. In the meantime, Marian had struck up conversations with the girls. It was going well when the teacher finally arrived.

  She was a young, curly headed gal. She took one look at us and said, “Hi. Who are you?”

  ‘Praise the Lord,” I said, reaching over some chairs and kids’ shoulders to shake her hand. “Travis and Marian Jordan.”

  “I’m Lucy Moore. It’s nice to have you visiting with us today.”

  Then she said with a chuckle, “Are you sure you’re in the right class?”

  “You bet,” I said. “I’m the new youth pastor.”

  She looked at me blankly for a second, then smiled and shook her head. “No, you’re not.”

  Then she dove into the lesson like a windup toy with the spring too tight and never made eye contact with us again. Marian and I sat there quietly, hesitant to say another word. I shot a glance at Trevor. He just gave me a shrug.

  And there was the strangest smell in that room, like someone left a dirty diaper under a chair. I saw a few noses wrinkle, but nobody said anything, and I wasn’t about to.

  IT WAS ACTUALLY A RELIEF when Pastor Marvin had us stand during the morning service so he could introduce us. “I’d like you all to meet Travis and Mary Jordan, our new assistant pastor. He’ll be helping us out with the youth program and whatever else his hand finds to do, so make him welcome.” He got Marian’s name wrong, but at least we knew we were in the right church.

  “WHAT’S HE DOING HERE?” a board member asked before Pastor Marvin even got his office door closed.

  Pastor Marvin sat down at his desk and answered like a cornered witness, “Well, we did discuss this, Bill.”

  Bill, a wiry, curly haired man in his fifties, had veins that stuck out on his forehead, and I think his eyes may have been sticking out a bit too. “You didn’t discuss it with me!”

  “I didn’t know he was coming today,” said a shorter, thinner, younger man.

  Bill glared at the younger man. “So he told you about it?”

  “He said we might try someone out. That’s all I heard.”

  “Well, I should have told you he was coming today,” said Pastor Marvin. “It’s my fault.”

  “You shouldn’t even have invited him without consulting with the board!”

  “Bill,” said an older man with a lower lip that stuck out, “we have talked about it.”

  “We’ve talked about it; we have not approved it!”

  Pastor Marvin broke in, “Gentlemen, before we start the meeting I should introduce Travis and Mary to you.”

  “Marian,” I corrected.

  “Oh. I am sorry. This is Travis and Marian Jordan. Travis recently graduated from West Bethel.” Then Pastor Marvin formally introduced us to Bill Braun, the angry one; Ted Neubaur, the younger, thin one; and Wally Barker, the older one with the lip. “Uh, where’s Rod?”

  Ted answered, “He and Marcy had to go right home. Trevor messed in his pants again.”

  Bill rolled his eyes. “Oh great!”

  Wally explained to us, “Trevor’s a weird kid. He messes in his pants.”

  “He doesn’t need to know that!”

  “Well, he does if he’s taking the youth.”

  “Well, what about Lucy? Has she been told about this?”

  No, I thought.

  Ted answered, “She was pretty upset when I talked to her. She said he came into her class and tried to take over.”

  “What?” I said.

  “We did no such thing!” Marian objected.

  Ted continued, “She’s the one in charge of the youth right now.

  Nobody told her these two were coming.”

  “Nobody told anybody anything!” Bill snapped. “See? Now you’ve hurt Lucy!”

  “Well,” said Pastor Marvin, “why don’t we open in a word of prayer? Dear Lord—”

  Let us live, I prayed silently, clutching Marian’s hand.

  The moment Pastor Marvin said Amen, Bill spoke the first words of the formal meeting. “And you announced his appointment from the pulpit! Before we’ve even met him or got to know him!”

  “I knew your dad,” Wally told me with a smile. “How’s he doing, anyway?”

  “Does he have another job?” Bill asked.

  “We’ll get to that,” said the pastor.

  “This was something we talked about, remember? Wally, you’re the accountant. Tell him. Again.”

  Wally’s face turned sad as he told the pastor, “We can’t swing a full-time salary, especially since we’ve lost the Cravens and the Johnsons.”

  “We told you that!”

  Pastor Marvin defended himself. “I think we can do it.”

  “If he has another job,” Bill reiterated, and then he looked at me and cocked his eyebrows, expecting an answer.

  Now they were all looking at me.

  “I . . . I understood that this was going to be my job.”

  “What skills do you have besides Bible college?”

  The question stung, not only because it was mean-spirited, but because of how I had to answer. “I don’t have any.”

  “Get some.”

  “Now Bill . . .” the pastor tried to admonish.

  Bill came right back, “I’m being honest. He can’t work in a church this size and expect a big church salary package. That’s the truth of it.”

  “Who’s paying for the apartment?” Ted asked.

  Bill’s voice approached a squawk. “What apartment?”

  “We discussed that as part of the package,” said Pastor Marvin.

  “He has an apartment?”

  It went on and on, with Marian and I cowering in our chairs while the pastor and the board argued right in front of us. I’ve never had such an experience before or since then, watching my hopes dashed to pieces while almost laughing at the absurdity of it. Finally, I suggested, “Why don’t Marian and I leave so you can discuss this freely among yourselves?”

  “Yeah, fine,” said Bill.

  “Okay,” said the pastor.

  We got up to leave.

  Bill didn’t even watch us go. “If he can get another job then maybe we can work something out.”

  MY SHIFT BEGAN at 9 P.M., as soon as the mall closed. My first task every night was to scrub and shine all the public restrooms. The toilets came first, then the sinks, then the stalls, walls, and floors. My supervisor said each rest room shouldn’t take more than an hour, but after a week on the job I had yet to cut my time down to less than two. I was working four nights a week and making five bucks an hour.

  The toughest toilets to clean were the ones that got clogged sometime during the day but patrons kept using them anyway until the bowl was full. Then the only way to clean them was to ladle the stuff into a bucket, get the toilet unclogged, and ladle it back in again, flushing it down in smaller loads. When I finished, I headed outside to get some air, laughing at the sign on the back of the rest room door: Employees Must Wash Hands Before Returning to Work.

  This toilet in the north men’s room was the worst I’d seen all week.

  I flushed the last load and grabbed the toilet brush out of my tool cart. Under my meticulous care, the porcelain bowl would soon be white again.

  With h
er business degree, Marian had landed a good job as accountant and office manager for a small firm that manufactured hydraulic valves and couplings. Suffice it to say, she was making better money than I was and providing the bulk of our living, including the apartment the church decided it couldn’t afford.

  What skills do you have besides Bible college?

  I wanted to slug that guy. Did he think four years of college counted for nothing?

  Well, apparently it qualified me to scrub toilets and sinks, refill soap containers and towel dispensers, and mop the floors.

  C’mon, let’s go, let’s go, let’s get it down to an hour.

  I moved to the next stall. Ah. The last patron’s mother had taught him well. This wouldn’t take long.

  My emotions and thoughts kept shifting back and forth from minute to minute. First, I felt okay about it. As weird, disappointing, and even maddening as it seemed, I accepted this as God’s calling. He was using this time to humble me. I needed to accept and embrace it. I needed to stay put and see it through.

  Then I thought of Minneapolis and the well-dressed man with the curly hair and the lady in the white silk blouse and navy skirt.

  After so many years, the image still made my stomach hurt. I felt like I was standing in that office again, unqualified, unfit, inadequate, a loser.

  What skills do you have besides Bible college?

  The answer was the toilet brush in my hand.

  C’mon, Trav, two more stalls to go.

  God was in control. He knew what he was doing, and he knew what I needed.

  Then my heart sank and my arms went limp. I’d failed again.

  I’d married the most beautiful woman in the world, given her high hopes, and let her down. She was the one supporting us, not me.

  I thought I was going to take the city for Christ, and now here I was, alone and scrubbing toilets in the middle of the night.

  My “position” at Northwest Pentecostal Mission remained undefined by the pastor or the board. I wasn’t associate pastor or youth pastor, I didn’t preach on Sunday nights, and Lucy Moore still had charge of the youth Sunday school class. I did whatever was left to do—it was up to me to think of what that was—and I got paid fifty dollars a month plus a gas allowance to do it. I think Pastor Marvin tried to apologize once, but his expression of regret quickly shifted into a short homily about the Lord using all this to show me the importance of sacrifice. It seemed rather convenient for him to find a lofty, inscrutable purpose of God in his foul-up, but I held my peace.

  The church in Pocatello, Idaho, had found someone else for that position. I checked.

  Seventeen

  IT WAS MARIAN, God bless her, who helped me turn it around—or rather, turn myself around. I still remember the evening I lay on the couch with my head in her lap. I had tears in my eyes, but she just stroked my hair and told me, “Travis, you’re a man of God and this is your calling. Don’t worry about me having to work. Just be faithful. Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might. God will do the rest.” She tilted my head toward her and I looked up into her eyes. “And I will always love you, T. J. You’re my man, and don’t you forget it.”

  I called Lucy Moore and apologized for all the misunderstanding. I didn’t want to take over, I told her. I just wanted to help. Could I? She said sure.

  At work that night I finished up each rest room in less than an hour.

  Wednesday evening, one of my nights off, Marian and I showed up to help Lucy with the youth meeting. I played guitar and helped lead the singing. We goaded and challenged the kids during discussion times. We did anything we could to help while letting Lucy be the boss. It clicked. Before long we were all team teaching the Sunday school class. We worked together planning a camping trip to Corral Pass, and it came off without a hitch.

  After I’d been on the job two months, the boss let me try my hand at the big mall sweeper. Now that was fun, driving that thing up and down the vast floor, buzzing past all the store windows and around the big central pillars, singing praise songs only the Lord could hear.

  How many shoppers ever got a chance to visit the mall as I did?

  For the first month I took care of mowing the church lawn, and then Lucy, Marian, and I organized a work day for the youth group to mow, weed, and fix up the church grounds. The kids did a great job, and we were proud of them. I rewarded them by taking them all swimming.

  Sister Marvin heard that some of the girls wore two-piece swimsuits and walked right by the groomed lawn to give me a stern rebuke. It was the first feedback I’d gotten from her.

  THE SUNDAY SCHOOL CLASS was perking up. We got into heavy discussions about morality, sex, authority, respect for others, honesty, and what the Scriptures had to say about it all. The kids opened up about school, friends, parents, hopes and fears, what was cool and what wasn’t. We talked about Bible prophecy and how it could apply to happenings in the Middle East. Even Trevor and the Outsiders got wrapped up in it. They talked about inviting their friends.

  When they didn’t invite their friends, I asked them why not.

  They said they didn’t want their friends to have to sing “Deep and Wide” and “Climb, Climb Up Sunshine Mountain” and march up front to put money in Barney Barrel.

  Well, that seemed an easy enough problem to overcome. I told Lucy, “Hey, why don’t we just have them come straight to class and not sit through the opening exercises? They never get anything out of them anyway.”

  Lucy balked. “Um, we’ll have to talk to Sister Dwight. She’s the Sunday school superintendent.”

  Sister Dwight didn’t jump at the idea either. “You’ll have to bring it up at the next Sunday school teachers’ meeting.”

  The meeting was after church the first Sunday of the month.

  We were there and we brought it up.

  And that’s how I got to know Sister Rogenbeck.

  She was an ancient lady who taught the primary class, and by the look on her face you’d think we suggested denying the virgin birth and the resurrection. She scolded me as she answered, “The children are to be together for the morning exercises!”

  Being young and inexperienced, I tried to reason with her.

  “Well, that’s okay for the little kids, but the teenagers don’t have any interest in that stuff.”

  “Then they can learn to have interest.”

  “You think kids who listen to the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin are going to want to come here to sing ‘Deep and Wide’?”

  She crossed her arms and looked toward the front of the sanctuary. “They belong in the morning exercises with everyone else!”

  From her body language I gathered she thought the discussion was over.

  It wasn’t.

  “Do you agree with her?” I asked Sister Dwight.

  Sister Dwight gave me a deep, slow nod as if the Word of the Lord had come down from Mt. Sinai.

  “But aren’t you the Sunday School superintendent?”

  She was mildly offended. “Of course I am.”

  I turned to Sister Rogenbeck. “So what are you?”

  She didn’t answer but just kept looking forward, her arms crossed.

  “Look at me.” Marian tugged at my arm but I ignored it and demanded, “Look at me!”

  Sister Dwight became indignant. “Travis, I don’t think this is appropriate!”

  Sister Rogenbeck’s head and eyes turned toward me only as much as necessary.

  “Are you the Sunday school superintendent?” I asked her.

  Sister Marvin’s indignity surpassed that of Sister Dwight. “Travis Jordan, that will be quite enough!”

  “Are you?”

  “No.”

  “Do you hold any elected office whatsoever in this church?”

  “No.”

  “Then who are you to sit there and dictate policy to the rest of us?”

  “Trav . . .” Marian whispered, tugging at me.

  “My question was addressed to the Sunday school sup
erintendent, and I expect the decision to rest with her.” I looked straight at Sister Dwight. “It is your decision, isn’t it?”

  “Well—”

  Sister Rogenbeck huffed rather loudly, “They belong in the morning exercises!”

  “I was asking Sister Dwight,” I said.

  But Sister Marvin answered, “Travis, that’s the way we do things!”

  I stayed on that merry-go-round for another twenty minutes, going round and round, hearing the same tune over and over and getting madder and madder. In the end, I accomplished nothing more than getting everyone upset, including myself. I was permanently angry with Sister Rogenbeck and permanently in the gunsights of Sister Marvin. I never did get an answer from Sister Dwight.

  And our Sunday school class continued to sit through “Deep and Wide” and march to put money in Barney Barrel. It was, after all, the way we did things.

  But the Wednesday night youth meeting held great promise.

  The time was all ours. We could lay out our own format. We painted posters, made announcements, and got the kids making announcements. I visited the junior high and high school as often as I could just to make contact with the kids. Marian and I attended the games, the concerts, the plays—anything that would get us close to them.

  The meetings began to grow. We were singing, worshiping, getting excited about Jesus. The fellowship hall began to fill up and we ran out of chairs. The kids brought pillows and sat on the floor.

  Shy Brian turned out to be a pretty good guitar player and I got him up front to help me lead worship. Then a kid named Robbie joined us on electric bass. As soon as they were clicking, I switched to doing fills on my banjo, which I plugged in for volume. We got into the Word and the kids started praying.

  And then Sister Marvin called a meeting.

  “I think you can find instruments more appropriate for worship!” she said archly.

  We were sitting in Pastor Marvin’s office, just the Marvins and me. I could tell she’d already had a pre-meeting with her husband to get him in line.

  “There’s nothing wrong with our instruments,” I said. “The kids are into it. I’ve even got two of them playing up front.”

  “Playing rock-’n’- roll in church!”